Tag: RAKAM

So the Polaris Prize winner announcement is rapidly approaching (September) and we have OPINIONS! Last year, we selected Chevalier Avant Garde’s Heterotopias as our Shadow Polaris pick. This year, the Silent Shout staff has expanded, so we’ve got even more thoughts about who is most deserving. And although the artists that have made the Polaris shortlist are unquestionably talented and put out some very fine work, almost none of them appear on any of our lists. Call us contrary. Without further ado, here are our staff picks for best Canadian album of the Polaris year (May 2012-June 2013):

So Majical Cloudz takes the prize this year for the incredible Impersonator, and the Shadow Polaris scepter remains in Montreal. But please take the time to check all the remarkable works we’ve listed today. Rankings are fun, but these are all spectacular albums that deserve your attention.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about Rakam‘s Stranger Things Before is how easy it is to imagine it never leaving the bedroom it was clearly created in. It could fairly be described as an attempt at pop music, but it exists in a space carved out entirely by its own gleefully freewheeling invention, and seems motivated exclusively by the giddy realization that there need not be a limit to what form that invention takes.

The New Wave DIY disco strut of the album’s only French language song, “Le Jazz dans la Rue,” is buoyed brilliantly by Marc-André Roy’s exaggerated cool-guy croon, reaching peaks of impassioned warbling that recall a Francophone Patrick D. Martin only to be interrupted by a surprisingly delicate Casiotone harpsichord arrangement. Another standout, “Long Island Beaches,” is about as close as Rakam gets to a plausible love song and veers into slightly more typical synth pop territory, albeit with some spastic drum machine programming and another run at a “baby’s first Bach” harpsichord interlude. The album’s instrumentals are consistently excellent, especially the wonderfully developed “Ocean Liner,” which owes equal debts to Brian Eno and 8-bit video game soundtracks, and shades its own complexity with its charmingly understated lo-fi sound and more than occasional missed notes. That juxtaposition is probably the greatest strength of Stranger Things Before, as it allows Rakam to maintain a level of intimacy while simultaneously being as wildly expansive and imaginative as they care to be. Stranger Things Before is available on RAKAM’s bandcamp.

This post first appeared as part of our New Zero Canada column on Berlin’s No Fear of Pop.

We wrote about Rakam‘s Le Jazz Dans La Rue a little while ago and in the interim we’ve not stopped listening to their excellent album, Stranger Things Before. Because we want everyone to love them forever and always, and get all up in their bandcamp buying their album, I’m posting another gem. This one features madcap falsetto, some daring drum machine programming, and is notable for featuring the lyric “I had to swim in the river of Mountain Dew” and somehow still being the most plausible love song on the record.

I have a confession to make. We must have been sleeping and we missed this when it came out and none of you should ever forgive us. This track comes from RAKAM‘s record Stranger Things Before and it is absolutely mind-bogglingly good. Super-slinky, playful, new hotness. Like a more electronic Patrick D Martin except in French and way better. Build your life around it.